


uldred

by foundCarcosa



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Gen, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-28
Updated: 2014-10-28
Packaged: 2018-02-23 01:25:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2528897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zion had always looked up to him, and he'd always been good to her. Or, so she recalls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	uldred

She’d loved Uldred from the beginning.

Senior enchanters were selective with their personal apprentices, choosing from the most studious and the most cautious, the precocious yet reserved children, the questioning and scholarly teenagers. Uldred took a shine to Zion from the beginning, to her wilful and bold questions during lessons, to her fearless and almost comically cocky way of striding through the halls, arms full of books almost as big as she was.

A quick and cunning study, her aptitude brought smiles to his lips and eyes. “Good lad,” he’d nod approvingly at her small transmutations and cantrips.

She never dared to correct him.

The rocky climb to adulthood sent her emotions — and, subsequently, her magic — into overdrive. She expected Uldred to withdraw his mentorship in disapproval, disgusted with her bursts of displaced anger and her increasingly belligerent behaviour. The templars watched her like vultures.

Dead mage walking.

But Uldred grew more protective, if anything.  
"Your anger is safe with me, young Amell," he’d confide, their low whispers the only sound that could be heard in the cavernous library, stars just beginning to wink into view outside of the barred window. "But only with me. You must be smart. You must be cunning.  
And most of all, you _must_ not break.”

—

No one bothered to tell her that her relationship with the senior enchanter, who should have known better, was improper at best and dangerous at worst.  
She wouldn’t have listened, anyway.

"Stop that! Stop calling me that! I’m _not_ a lad!” she seethed at him one day, tears standing in her eyes, fire crackling just behind them. “I’m _not!”_

"No?" he smiled, his eyes moving pointedly down her growing body, growing too fast, too insistently. "I see differently."

"And I _feel_ differently!”

He watched her for a tense moment, the crinkles around his eyes fading as he sobered. “So you do.  
So you do.”

He signed the slip of valuable vellum that would allow her passage into the restricted section of the second-floor library, and left Zion to learn for herself, learn whatever she may, and do whatever she must.

—

No one save Uldred expected her to pass her Harrowing. Least of all herself.

"How did you know I would?" she asked him, clad in fresh, heavy robes, an adult in the Circle’s eyes.

"Because I passed mine," he responded, cryptically.

He never explained. He never got to.

—

"So it is you who faces me, here at the beginning and the end, my sweet Amell," he smiles when he sees her for the last time. A griffon adorns her robes now, and her staff is Warden-issue, but before him now, she feels like the wild-haired child she’d been, the one who grew up tempestuous and cunning in Uldred’s looming, darkling shadow.

Senior Enchanter Wynne’s staff crackles threateningly, and Leliana mouths the words of the Litany of Adralla to herself in preparation, but all Zion can think is, _how much different are we, really; and what gives_ me _the right to judge...?_

But the mages are dying as they transform, warped and terrible, and for once the old first enchanter must trust in her, and Uldred’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes anymore -- and perhaps it never did -- and Zion Amell is no longer his pet.

She blinks back the tears and raises her staff, and Leliana begins to sing.


End file.
